The radical history of personal computing—looms, coding, beige boxes and AI
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A pig gets shot and this nearly starts a war. A pastry shop gets trashed. War. A football match turns ugly. Also war? Hey there. I'm Mark Finnell. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are taking on history's most absurd conflicts. Four episodes, four wars, and we called it This Stupid War. Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Personal computers are so ubiquitous now that most of us carry one in our pockets, all day, every day. It's hard to imagine a time when computers were inaccessible to everyday people, and so big they filled entire rooms and were mainly used for specialist tasks like processing scientific data or sending men to the moon. So when computers did start entering the home in the 1980s, how humans interacted daily with machines changed forever. Now maybe I'm giving away my age, but I remember when I was 12 years old, we got our first beast of a computer in my family, a Hewlett-Packard with storage that was minuscule and a desktop footprint that was huge. We used it mainly to play Prince of Persia, Carmen Sandiego and Gossip with Friends on ICQ.
Mel Huang Buntine is a designer and technologist, and she was gifted her first computer as a tween living in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in the 1990s, and it was a hand-me-down beige box of a thing. And it was a big deal. Her great-grandmother, grandparents and mum had all escaped the Cambodian genocide as refugees. And they could not understand why Mel was obsessed with this machine. But that computer completely opened up Mel's world and would end up changing her life. And now she's curated an exhibition called Radical Computing at the National Communication Museum. Hey, Mel. Hello. Hey, Mel, tell me more about your very first computer, this beige box, as I called it before.
Yes, it definitely was a beige box. It's like, I would say, the most uninteresting computer. It was a 286 or a 386. It was, yeah, a beige box that was horizontal with a screen on top. It didn't have an operating system. So we had to type in commands to like start games or explore things. And yeah, it was kind of ancient technology at the time as well. So it was even more useless compared to today's standards.
So it was benign. It was beige.
How did personal computers first enter homes in the 1980s?
It didn't even have an operating system. And at the same time, what did it mean to you personally to be gifted this computer as a hand-me-down?
Well, it was everything to me. So, you know, I grew up fairly sheltered. The world outside was scary. I wasn't allowed to kind of hang out with my friends after school or anything like that. So I'd come straight home and the only kind of access to the outside world was through this computer. So it was pretty important to me and pretty important for my development of the things I was interested in because my family were definitely too busy trying to keep everything afloat to be wondering what I was doing on the computer or what a computer even was. So yeah, it was kind of my own little world.
And when you say the outside world was scary, how scary was it? What are we talking about?
Yeah, so I guess when they came over from Cambodia, they were living in, I guess, commissioned housing and refugee type areas. They can be fairly dangerous. You know, you're talking about a lower socioeconomic kind of area. They were working in factories. The nighttime was seen as a really scary thing. And my grandparents kind of faced a couple of kind of scary incidents that made them very cautious about, I guess, a young girl being outside by themselves in the dark. So, yeah, we had to come home before dark most of the time.
So here you are at home with this computer in the dark and you're able to access the outside world. What exactly were you doing on this computer? Yeah.
Talking to friends. I was making websites, even though I describe it as like, I never knew that I was making a website, really. I was just really in love with Eminem at the time.
Wait, so you were making, what, an Eminem fan
site? I was making an Eminem fan site with all my favourite photos of Eminem with, you know, his latest track playing in the background and some animated GIFs probably floating around.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:03
2
How did personal computers first enter homes in the 1980s?
3:03–8:04
3
What was Mel’s first ‘beige box’ computer and why was it so important to her?
8:04–10:16
4
How did a refugee family’s background shape Mel’s relationship with technology?
10:16–24:43
5
What early web projects did Mel create and how did they spark her creativity?
24:43–53:02
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Conversations
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